South Dakota: The Breakdown

We left the Badlands and drove through endless farmland on our way to Sioux Falls where we intended to rest up and have lunch. Several hours later and only a few miles outside of the city the Zinger had had enough. After so many days of amazing (almost unbelievable) driving, a breakdown was pretty much inevitable. Driving smoothly down the highway, all of a sudden the 'something's wrong' lights came on and we quickly pulled over. Somehow all of the belts attached to the motor had come off and we had lost a bunch of coolant. We called AAA for (only!) the 3rd tow of our entire trip.

Unfortunately it was Sunday and no mechanics were open so we had the tow truck driver drop us off at our favorite hotel- Walmart. The next morning we got towed to an All Tune & Lube in town which was the only place that would take a look at our van and wasn't busy 'til next week. They replaced the belts and we were psyched it wasn't anything more serious. They said the thing that held the dipstick tube had broken and it had rubbed up against one of the belts causing them all to bounce off. We topped off our coolant and got on our way. Luckily we decided to gas up and check our oil right down the street. When we went to pull the dipstick out we discovered the mechanic had 'tied it down' in such a way that we couldn't even pull it out. Um, hello? We drove back and had them redo it the correct way.

We hit the highway and made it a mile further than where we had first broken down and then the bad lights came on again. We pulled over and much to our dismay found out a belt had come off again. This time it was only one but when we gave up trying to put it back on ourselves we had to call AAA to get our third tow in 2 days. Luckily all the tows were totally covered by AAA. Back to All Tune and Lube we went. Third time's a charm we figured. This time they put the belt back on and we heard them rev the engine for a while (which they had not done the first time around). They said the belt connected to the air conditioner was probably the culprit as it was flapping around wildly. We suspect they were just covering their asses and what had actually happened was when we brought the van back to get the dipstick properly positioned they took off the belt (that came off the second time) and didn't properly tighten it when they put it back on...

All the work after the initial repair was pro bono (except for the fact that we used up all our free tows) and since we never used the AC anyways (it puts too much stress on an already stressed out motor) we told the mechanic to just cut the belt and take it out. The reattached belt (feeling nice and tight this time) worked out fine and we hit the highway.  They weren't bad mechanics, just not very thorough. Vans like ours definitely were not their specialty but the only VW place in town was super busy (as most good VW shops seem to be). We were able to swing by the VW shop and have them confirm that everything looked good before leaving town. Hopefully this will be our last vehicular incident of the trip. Fingers crossed like always!